Backyard Metalcasting
Survival Industry includes a new ore-doubling and alloying mechanic, called "Vanilla Ingot Works." This mechanic is based off of the real-world practice known as "green sand casting," in which a hobbyist melts down metal in a small ceramic crucible, and then pours the molten metal into a mold made of sand. You can find more information about the technique here. This mechanic is strictly for the creation of metal ingots; it does not duplicate the toolmaking features of the Tinker's Construct smeltery; the tools used in this pack use the standard vanilla recipes. The Tools Vanilla Ingot Works consists of two new tools, the crucible and the sand mold. The Crucible The crucible is the first tool. It is a clay pot using sand as a binder; you craft this with a block of sand and a block of clay in the crafting table. Its purpose is to hold the metal, both solid and liquid forms, until you can pour it into a mold. It is not useful, however, until it has been fired. Firing a crucible is pretty much standard stuff; once you've formed it, you simply need to cook it in the vanilla furnace. Once it comes out, it will be a tan color, as opposed to the neutral gray color the unfired crucible is. Once it's been fired, you can use it. The Sand Mold The liquid in the crucible is useless without a way of being turned into ingots. For that, you need to make ingot-shaped molds. This is where the sand mold comes in. To form a sand mold, you simply need to put a block of sand in the crafting grid. The block of sand will become the sand mold. If, for some reason, you don't want the mold anymore (you no longer have anything to smelt), then you can turn the mold back into sand through two methods. The first method is to craft a sand mold with a stick to make a block of sand. If you don't want to waste (or don't have) any sticks, the other method is to simply drop the sand mold; it will automatically revert to a sand block. Using the Tools A crucible is placed on a crafting grid with either one block of ore, or two ingots of different metal. In both cases, it will hold two ingots worth of metal. If it's the ore, than the ore will be doubled. If a valid alloying recipe is used (tin and copper, for example), then the output will be two ingots worth of the desired alloy. To actually turn the solid metals/ore into the liquid metal, all you need to do is place the filled crucible in the vanilla furnace. A hot crucible will come out. Once you have the hot crucible, simply put it in a crafting grid with a sand mold. This process will return two ingots of the desired metal type, as well as an undamaged crucible and a block of sand (once a mold is used, it will always revert to a sand block).